Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick
by perforated sphere
Summary: You oughta get yourself a new hero, Frankie, my mother would say when she came home from work. It wasn’t until after the strike that I realized how similar my story was to his. [Oneshot]


_Author's Note: I've been procrastinating writing this for two days, and I don't really know where it came from. I saw the DVD box for a movie I hadn't watched in years, since the day it came out, and was suddenly struck with this random idea. It's kind of lame, but it worked time-wise, and I always did sort of wonder... but whatever.

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I always knew that I was never really Francis Sullivan. Even in New York City, the son of an immigrant and a waitress can never amount to much. Especially when your father's an unemployed drunk, and your mother, no matter how hard she works, barely makes enough money to support all three of you, let alone enough for you to get an education. As far as anyone knew, I was one of many, of the poor kids in New York, the ones who would later become my family. But I knew I would be more. I wasn't just another one of them. Somehow, someday, I was sure, I would make something of myself.

My father came to New York from Victoria - Australia, now, since 1901 - in 1881. He wasn't a Brit or a native, he was Irish (with a last name like Sullivan, would you doubt it?); his family had emigrated there before he was born, further back than I want to count. He never said exactly why, just that he met my ma just days after coming to the city. They got hitched, I was born, everything typical, no need for details. All that makes a difference is time. By the time I was five, he was drinking more than a glass or two at dinner; when I was ten, he lost his job, and had nothing to do but sit around all day getting drunk.

But _before_ - before he got so smashed that his words weren't understandable, before he started beating her and then me, before a whole lot of things - he started telling the stories. Stories that, now, I'm sure he didn't think would mean a thing to a little kid. And they wouldn'tve, had I not been who I was where I was. But I listened.

He would talk about Victoria, what it was like before he came here. The forests, the open fields, the wild horses…the way he described it, it was paradise. Sometimes he talked about his family, people who may or may not have even existed. But mostly he talked about Ned Kelly. Supposedly, he was some guy that he knew "back home," but might've been the liquor talking. The Irish, my father would say, were more than oppressed by the police and the rich and the British. They were the lowest of the low, and everyone made sure they knew it. I never really knew how the story started, but Ned and his brother and a couple other guys joined up to stop them. The Kelly Gang, as they called themselves, killed a few policemen and robbed a couple banks, all the while bringing hope to the lower-class Irish like themselves. They all died in the end. Ned Kelly was hung after being caught by the cops.

And I wanted to be just like him.

"You oughta get yourself a new hero, Frankie," my mother would say when she came home from work as I tried to tell her about what I'd learned while she was out working. Had I been there now, I would've noticed how tired she looked, how strained her voice was, how little change was jingling in her pockets and said something about that. At least I'd like to think that. Instead, all I could talk about was how amazing, how heroic, how brave this guy my father'd known was, how I wanted to be just like him when I grew up.

Fate has a funny way of doing things.

The stories my father told were the furthest things from my mind when I was breaking out of the Refuge. As a matter of fact, I hadn't thought about my father's drunken tales of Ned Kelly in what seemed like years. All I could let myself think of was surviving, of not going back there, of doing whatever I needed to. When I realized I needed to give myself a new name, so as not to be found, it was the first thing that came to mind, so I took it. It wasn't until after the strike that I realized how similar my story was to his, on a smaller scale. Except for that I won, and he didn't. You could argue that he did - a petition to save him was signed by thousands of people, my dad said, himself included - but they got him, he died, the end.

I got my last name from a childhood hero. My first name came from a guy in the Refuge, a good friend of mine. He still calls me what he yelled out to me that day, as I waved to everyone from the top of Roosevelt's carriage -

"Jack be nimble, Jack be quick."


End file.
